Waking Up With The Emerald City

The Jolt Of Nature Is Never Far Away In A Place Where Fish Fly And Eagles Soar

March 12, 2000|By Robert Cross, Tribune Staff Writer.

SEATTLE — Funny thing about names.

In Pike Place Market, the central tourist-attracting jewel in the emerald crown of the Emerald City, one part of the complex is named the Sanitary Market Building, constructed in 1910 and called "sanitary" because workhorses weren't allowed inside.

FOR THE RECORD - This story contains corrected material, published March 24, 2000.

As I read the historic marker that laid out this information, I suddenly came down with a case of free association.

How did this city of hills and mountains, bays and inlets, lakes and Puget Sound come to be associated with turf and pari-mutuel windows?

A little research revealed that the horse belonged to a Washington State lumberman named Mickey Taylor. He hailed from Yakima, but if you have big ambitions for a big racehorse, you don't name him after a middle-sized town in an obscure valley between the Saddle Mountains and Horse Heaven Hills (appropriate as that may seem).

No, you name him after the Queen City -- another nickname -- of the Evergreen State.

How many people link Seattle with a famous racehorse? How many, for that matter, realize Seattle was named for Chief Sealth of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes? In 1855, he signed a treaty that ceded most of what is now the northwestern corner of the state to the U.S. government. His friendship with the settlers inspired them to rename their village Seattle (easier to say than Sealth). Originally, they had called the town Duwamps. Those settlers -- having saved future racetrack announcers from having to pronounce Duwamps Slew -- gradually squeezed out the natives, and the government neglected to pay the full $150,000 purchase price. But the newcomers kept the name.

"Our city is actually the largest American city ever named after a Native American individual -- not an Indian word or a tribe but a person," Gael Zane pointed out one morning. Zane stood next to a large bronze bust of Chief Sealth in Pioneer Square -- site of Seattle's first downtown -- at the start of a guided tour called Underground Seattle.

Zane recited the sad tale of the Duwamish and Suquamish. And after that, she pointed out a large sign behind the Sealth bust, an art construction covered with tribal writings too sacred for translation. "A good name for the piece would be `Thanks a lot, whitey,'" Zane remarked.

She led her 20 tourists across the street to the foot of a hill on which developers had built an ugly parking garage. That garage replaced the picturesque old Hotel Seattle, but at least construction of the ugly concrete parking structure awakened the citizenry. A protectionist movement worked to preserve the rest of Pioneer Square's collection of 19th Century Victorian buildings.

At one point during recent development fervor, newspaper columnist Emmett Watson wrote, "Progress will be the death of Seattle yet." Fortunately, the people took heed.

Long before garage or hotel, the hill served as a convenient mudslide that lumberjacks employed to transport logs down to the waterfront.

"So they called this hill Skid Road," Zane said. "That already was a very common logging term for years in mill towns," Zane said. "But it was in Seattle that a journalist first applied it -- changed to Skid Row -- to an undesirable part of an urban area. And we're very proud to say that Skid Row started here, not in New York."

Names again. Seattle has contributed so much to the American lexicon.

But over the years, it was a boom and bust sort of place with a geological makeup that defied those settlers who would make it a city. Mud slides, a fire and tidal inundation kept wrecking things. Then came the Gold Rush, and local merchants cleaned up by selling supplies to the prospectors passing through.

After the fire of 1889, townspeople began to rebuild with masonry. Then they discovered the perpetual mud made streets impassible. So they moved entrances to the second story and built sidewalks and streets above the slop.

The Underground Tour explores those original storefronts, hotels and saloons, now gathering dust beneath creaky floorboards. There isn't much left to see -- a series of basements, exposed beams, an occasional wall with windows staring at another wall.

Zane freely acknowledged the rather unpleasant potential of an underground tour. She told customers who were wearing open-toed shoes: "We call those rat hors d'oeuvre trays." And beneath a sidewalk skylight of glass blocks, she urged everyone to scream "Help!" We did, but pedestrians up above ignored our cries and kept on walking.

"Usually, when we do that, nobody pays any attention," Zane admitted. "Oh, sometimes a lawyer will stop and push his card through a crack."